Part 2 (1/2)

She turned and stared as if just remembering I was there. I took her hand and tugged her down into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. There was the sugar bowl, my teacup and spoon, her gla.s.s and the bottle of vodka, everything just as it had been, everything the same. I willed myself to be still, praying for my voice to be calm. If I wasn't panicking, she wouldn't panic, and she'd give me the whole story, a story that would make sense and have a beginning and an end and would not involve a corpse. ”Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning, okay?” Another breath. ”Start with Dan.”

She looked down at her lap. ”I saw him at the bar,” she said. ”Him and his friends.” I waited. Valerie pressed her hands together. ”I was just going to ignore him, but he walked right up to me, and it was okay at first. He said he'd seen me on TV, and how nice it was that someone from our cla.s.s had gotten famous.” She allowed herself to preen briefly at the word ”famous.” I didn't have the heart to tell her that reading the weather on the nightly news did not exactly make her a movie star. The truth was, anyway, she was right-if you considered the combined resumes of the 296 surviving members of our cla.s.s, Valerie was the most famous... unless you were inclined to count Gordon Perrault, who'd blown out his back raking leaves, developed an unfortunate addiction to fentanyl patches, and was currently serving five to seven for robbing a drugstore while wearing a Burger King mask.

”I was just having a good time, talking to people, and I had a few drinks, and things were winding down when I heard him at the bar. He was with Chip Mason and Kevin Oliphant, remember them?”

I nodded, vaguely recalling two hulking boys in football jerseys.

”And Kevin said something to Dan like, 'Hey, Valerie's here. You going back for seconds?' And Dan laughed. He laughed.”

I didn't answer. Of course he'd laughed. Laughing was what guys like Dan did.

”They didn't know I heard him,” Val said. Her voice was climbing higher and higher. ”So I went back to the bar, and I started flirting with him. You know. Touching his arm, asking lots of questions, acting like I was into him. I told him to meet me outside... that I'd give him a ride. I waited for him, and he came outside, and we were fooling around and then...” She gulped. ”I made him take his clothes off.”

I gaped at her. ”Why?”

”Because it's humiliating,” she said, as if this were obvious. ”And it's cold out. Major shrinkage. I took a picture with my cell phone...”

”As you do,” I murmured.

Val ignored me. ”I got in the car and I was going to drive away, you know, just leave him there, let him see how he likes being the one everyone's laughing at, and I turned the car on, and he was grabbing at the mirror, and I stepped on the gas, and I think he must have jumped in front of me and maybe I was in drive instead of reverse and then... he was...” She buried her face in her hands.

”You hit him?”

She bent her head, shoulders shaking, saying nothing.

I said it again, only this time not as a question. ”You hit him.”

”It was an accident,” she breathed, and stared at me defiantly. ”I think it was kind of the car's fault. I've got this new Jaguar. I didn't know my own power.” She pushed her hair behind her ears, first one side, then the other, a gesture I remembered. ”He deserved it,” Valerie said. ”He deserved it for what he did to me.”

I couldn't speak. I could only look at her. Valerie twisted her hands in her lap. ”I tried not to think about it... about what happened. About what...” She gathered herself. ”What he did to me. And you... I'm so sorry, Addie,” she whispered. ”You were trying to do the right thing. I know that now.”

”It doesn't matter,” I said. My throat was thick with unshed tears; my eyes were burning. ”It was a long time ago.”

”But you were my friend.” Val's voice cracked, and I made myself look away, knowing that if she cried, I'd cry, too, and if I cried, I would remember. I would remember, for example, a cardboard box filled with tangled marionette wires, or my brother's face, blank and bewildered, as the vice princ.i.p.al asked him, impatiently, which boys had thrown his backpack down the stairs, or Halloween night and the cop car parked outside my house, lights flas.h.i.+ng, painting the walls red, then blue, red, then blue. I'd remember Mrs. Ba.s.s's voice on the telephone, telling me about my father. I'd remember covering my mother's body with a blanket that I'd knitted, telling her to rest.

”So then what happened?” I asked.

”He was by the Dumpster. He was lying there, bleeding. His... his...” She touched one hand to her temple. ”He wasn't moving. I tried to get him to talk to me, but he was, like, pa.s.sed out, and I was going to call 911, but I knew they'd trace the call and it would be in the papers, and I didn't know what else to do, so I grabbed up all his clothes and put them in the car and I came here.” She looked up. ”We have to go. You have to come with me. We have to go see if he's... if he's...”

”Dead?” I supplied. She made a mewling noise and reached past me, grabbing for the vodka bottle.

”Just so I'm clear here,” I asked, ”you never tried to get back into the country club? You didn't tell anyone?”

Val dumped more vodka into her gla.s.s. ”I was so freaked out! I had blood on my hands, there was blood on my coat, and you know how I am with blood.”

”Which you'd think would be a deterrent against hitting people with your Jaguar,” I mused. My telephone-a new one, cordless and sleek-sat in the same spot on the counter where my parents' old rotary phone had been. I picked it up and pointed it at her. ”Call the police.”

”And say what?” she asked. ”Hi, I think I just ran over this guy from high school, could you please go see if he's dead?”

”That sounds about right to me.”

”We'll just go look!” she pleaded. ”If he's alive, we'll call an ambulance and get him to a hospital! I promise!”

”And if he's not?”

She drained her gla.s.s, wiped her cheeks, and raised her chin. ”Then I will call the police and turn myself in.”

Ha. Valerie Adler was not the call-the-police-and-turn-yourself-in type. Valerie Adler was the steal-a-car-and-drive-across-the-border-to-Mexico type. She was also the type to stash her former best friend as a hostage-slash-accomplice in the pa.s.senger seat. She was brave and clever, ruthless and fearless. It was why I'd loved her so much when we'd been girls.

”We should call an ambulance. We shouldn't just be sitting here.”

”Right,” she said, and grabbed my hand. ”Go get dressed. Let's go.”

No, the rational part of my brain insisted, even as I walked upstairs to the bedroom that I still thought of as my parents' and pulled on jeans and a sweater and heavy black clogs. You don't have to do what she tells you!

I grabbed my purse, my keys, my wallet, watching my hands move as if they belonged to someone else, gathering my coat, my scarf, a hat I'd knitted. And then we were outside. The mist had turned into an icy drizzle, and Val's diamond earrings flashed in the moonlight, and somewhere in the stream of time, the waters were s.h.i.+fting, and all of this had happened already, only I didn't know it yet.

She handed me her keys. ”Can you drive?” she asked.

”Better than you, evidently.”

”Ha,” she said, and followed me to the Jaguar. She got into the pa.s.senger's seat. I looked for signs of damage-a dent, a crumpled fender, a blood-washed headlight-but I couldn't see a thing. G.o.d bless British engineering. I got behind the wheel, backed carefully down the driveway, and aimed the car toward the highway.

SEVEN.

The Adlers moved in during the last week of June, and by July, Valerie and I were inseparable. Every morning, I'd wake up and wave to her through the living room window, and she'd grin at me and wave back from hers. At noon, when Jon and I came home from day camp at the rec center, Valerie would be sitting on our front step, in her cutoff shorts and too-big flip-flops. Sometimes she'd be reading an Encyclopedia Brown book, or bouncing a red rubber ball that she kept in her pocket, but most of the time she'd just be waiting there, calm and patient in the sticky heat. My mom would make us lunch, and if he was home, my dad would join us for sandwiches, potato chips, pickles, and fruit, served with Country Time lemonade that we'd mix up and drink by the pitcher.

After the first week, we got used to setting an extra place at the table, and to making extra sandwiches. I usually ate one or one and a half of the ham and Swiss or peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly, and Jon always ate two, but Valerie could put away three sandwiches by herself, along with multiple helpings of chips, gla.s.ses of lemonade, a peach or a plum or sometimes both, and once, an entire quart of blueberries.

While we had lunch, my parents would ask us questions: What had we done that morning? What had we made in crafts? Who had we played with? Jon, with his mouth full of whole wheat and lunch meat, would rattle off the names of a half-dozen boys, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as he could without my mother objecting. I'd keep quiet, letting Jon talk. There was one girl named Heather who would let me sit with her at snack time, but only if I gave her my graham crackers. When I told my mom about it, she got a sad look on her face and said it would probably be best if I just stayed with the counselors.

After lunch, my mother would return to the screened-in sunporch, taking along a notebook and a pitcher of iced tea. My father would return to the bas.e.m.e.nt or the garage. Jon would dump his dishes in the sink, jump on his bike, and vanish until dinnertime. I'd pack snacks-cherries and pretzels, apples and granola bars-and wait for Valerie to determine our afternoon activity. She was full of ideas, and I was happy to go along with them. Let's try to skateboard down Summit Drive, she'd say, and off we'd go, to borrow a skateboard and give it a try. Or, Let's ride our bikes to the mall and see a movie! I was terrified of biking on busy roads, but even more terrified of telling Val that and having her find another friend, so I'd follow her, the taste of copper pennies in my mouth as I pedaled, my hands greased with sweat as I gripped the handlebars for the length of the two-mile trip.

Most days, though, we'd end up at the pool. Jon and I had summer pa.s.ses to the Kresse Rec Center. Once Val's bike was unpacked, we'd ridden there together. While I'd carefully locked my bike to the bike rack, Val had squinted at the sign above the desk that said admission was fifty cents. ”I don't have any money,” she'd said.

”Oh.” My face heated up. This was a complication that hadn't occurred to me. ”We could go back home. I've got my allowance...”

”Let me think,” said Val. She frowned at the sign. ”Wait here,” she said, then hopped back on her bike. A few minutes later she was back, flushed and sweaty and looking pleased. ”Okay,” she said. ”Here's what we'll do.” Her plan was for me to present my card to the bored, magazine-reading, gum-chomping teenage girl at the booth, then spread out my towel at the far edge of the deck, near the chain-link fence, and slip the card through the fence to Valerie, who'd use it to get herself in.

”But isn't that stealing?” I asked.

Val shook her head. ”You're really just paying for the lifeguards, and I don't need a lifeguard. I'm a very good swimmer. In California, I swam in the ocean.” I was meant to be impressed by this, and I was. I locked my bike to the rack, flashed my card at the girl behind the desk, who barely looked up from her Cosmopolitan, and made my way to the edge of the concrete. A minute later, Val was there waiting for me. I rolled my card into a tube, looked around to make sure no one was watching, and pa.s.sed it through one of the chain-link diamonds. A minute later, Val was walking past the pool, a raggedy towel tucked under her arm, the knot of her bathing suit halter top sticking up from the back of her T-s.h.i.+rt. ”See?” she said, spreading her towel out next to mine. ”No big deal.”

On rainy days we'd stay in the kitchen, making concoctions of peanut b.u.t.ter and coconut flakes and whatever else we could scrounge from the pantry, or we'd go to the bas.e.m.e.nt and take turns doing laps with my old pair of roller skates while listening to Val's favorite (and as far as I could tell, only) record, a 45 of Kenny Rogers's ”The Gambler.” Sometimes my father would sing along.

One Sat.u.r.day morning, Val gave her usual knock at our door, then, as had become her habit on the weekends, pushed it open and presented herself at the kitchen table. ”Hey, Addie, can you come over? My mom and I are going to paint my room.”